Hi everyone, here are our five suggested reads of the week!
Weekly Suggested Reading Five postings are usually published on Wednesdays, unless Monday is a holiday and then they are published later in the week.
And the next Suggested Reading posting will be published on Wednesday, October 23, 2024.
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Death by Misadventure: A Lady Emily Mystery by Tasha Alexander
In the latest installment of Tasha Alexander’s New York Times bestselling series, Lady Emily must solve a string of high stakes “accidents” while trapped in a lavish villa in the Bavarian Alps.
In the winter of 1906, Lady Emily and husband Colin are invited to the opulent home of Baroness Ursula von Duchtel in the Bavarian alps. Outside is a mountainous winter wonderland with a view of Mad King Ludwig’s fairy tale castle. Inside, the villa hosts a magnificent but eclectic art collection—as well as an equally eclectic collection of fellow guests, among them a musician, an art dealer, a coquette from the demi-monde, and Kaspar, the Baroness’ boorish son-in-law, whom, it begins to appear, someone wants dead.
Almost forty years earlier, Niels, a young German lord, sings to himself in the forest surrounding those same alps, capturing the attention of a not-yet-mad King Ludwig. Niels and the king become fast friends, their relationship deepening into something more as their time together stretches on. But while King Ludwig is content to live out a fantasy where their responsibilities don’t matter and the outside world doesn’t affect them, Niels knows that their bliss cannot last forever…
Decades later, Emily continues to investigate Kaspar’s increasingly lethal “mishaps” when tragedy strikes, ensnaring the guests in a web of fear and suspicion. It’s up to Emily to sift through old secrets and motivations, some stretching far into the past, to unmask the killer.
Reader’s Note: Death by Misadventure is the eighteenth book in the Lady Emily series. If you’d like to binge read from the beginning, check out book one And Only to Deceive.
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Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions by John Grisham & Jim McCloskey
Bestseller Grisham (The Exchange) teams up with Centurion Ministries founder McCloskey (When the Truth Is All You Have), whose nonprofit works to exonerate wrongly accused individuals, to tell 10 such stories in this gripping account. In alternating chapters, Grisham and McCloskey cover cases with a variety of stakes and backgrounds—some involve forced confessions, others faulty forensics. Most chilling is the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, a Texas man convicted of killing his three daughters by setting fire to their house, who was executed in 2004, just before a new forensics report went public, confirming that the lethal fire wasn’t arson. Not all the stories are so bleak: Grisham opens with a detailed account of the “Norfolk Four,” Navy sailors who were given nearly $5 million by the Virginia government in 2017 after their wrongful convictions for a rape and murder. Elsewhere, McCloskey traces the decades-long saga of soldier Mark Jones and his friends, who were exonerated of a murder that took place on the night of Jones’s 1992 bachelor party. Grisham’s narrative gifts come in handy—his chapters are slightly more propulsive than Jones’s—but both men deliver a series of thoroughly researched spellbinders. The results are equal parts fascinating and infuriating. – Publishers Weekly Review
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From Here to the Great Unknown: A Memoir by Lisa Marie Presley
Born to an American myth and raised in the wilds of Graceland, Lisa Marie Presley tells her whole story for the first time in this raw, riveting, one-of-a-kind memoir faithfully completed by her daughter, Riley Keough.
In 2022, Lisa Marie Presley asked her daughter to help finally finish her long-gestating memoir.
A month later, Lisa Marie was dead, and the world would never know her story in her own words, never know the passionate, joyful, caring, and complicated woman that Riley loved and now grieved.
Riley got the tapes that her mother had recorded for the book, lay in her bed, and listened as Lisa Marie told story after story about smashing golf carts together in the yards of Graceland, about the unconditional love she felt from her father, about being upstairs, just the two of them. About getting dragged screaming out of the bathroom as she ran toward his body on the floor. About living in Los Angeles with her mother, getting sent to school after school, always kicked out, always in trouble. About her singular, lifelong relationship with Danny Keough, about being married to Michael Jackson, what they had in common. About motherhood. About deep addiction. About ever-present grief. Riley knew she had to fulfill her mother’s wish to reveal these memories, incandescent and painful, to the world.
To make her mother known.
This extraordinary book is written in both Lisa Marie’s and Riley’s voices, a mother and daughter communicating—from this world to the one beyond—as they try to heal each other. Profoundly moving and deeply revealing, From Here to the Great Unknown is a book like no other—the last words of the only child of an American icon.
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Small Rain: A Novel by Garth Greenwell
A gay poet struggles with a mysterious and agonizing pain in Greenwell’s intense latest (after Cleanness). Wracked with debilitating agony that stretches through the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic, the unnamed narrator is urged by his partner, L, to see a doctor. After waiting for hours in the emergency room, he endures a battery of examinations and tests. Eventually, he receives a shocking diagnosis of life-threatening aortic tearing. Weeks of hospitalization and grueling procedures follow, and over the course of his slow recovery, the narrator juxtaposes raw depictions of his vulnerability and helplessness with excoriating critiques of the healthcare industry’s inequities and inefficiencies and the alienation he feels among the “relentlessly heterosexual” staff. The narrator also reflects on his dysfunctional family history; meeting L as a creative writing student in Iowa City, where he’s remained after graduating seven years earlier; and the negotiations he and L have gone through to find happiness and fulfillment in their shared living space. The virtuosic first-person narration, devoid of dialogue, places the reader front and center in the narrator’s bracing account of his grueling ordeal (“The pain defied description, on a scale of one to ten it demanded a different scale”), serving as a palpable reminder to never take one’s health for granted, and it builds to a cathartic and unforgettable conclusion. It’s a luminous departure from Greenwell’s spare and erotic earlier work. – Starred Publishers Weekly Review
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The Waiting by John Connolly
At the start of Connelly’s unputdownable sixth crime thriller costarring Renée Ballard (after Desert Star), the LAPD detective’s badge and gun are stolen from her car while she’s surfing. In the process of getting them back, she uncovers evidence that an extremist group is planning a terrorist attack in Malibu and enlists her friend Harry Bosch—still recovering from cancer—and the FBI to thwart it. Meanwhile, Ballard handles a number of high-stakes cases as leader of the LAPD’s cold case unit. First, her team of volunteers finds a DNA match that opens the door to solving a string of sexual assaults, dating back 20 years, by the “Pillowcase Rapist.” Then Harry’s daughter, Maddie, a patrol officer, joins Ballard’s team after stumbling on some explosive evidence related to the 1947 Black Dahlia killing, “the most famous unsolved murder in the history of Los Angeles.” As always, Connelly brilliantly renders the ins and outs of these investigations, all while adding layers to Ballard’s backstory—including a moving subplot about her missing mother—and delivering white-hot suspense guaranteed to please his fans. This ranks with Connelly’s best. – Starred Publishers Weekly Review
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Happy reading!
Linda Reimer, SSCL
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Note: Book summaries are from the respective publishers unless otherwise specified.
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Information on the three library catalogs
The Digital Catalog: https://stls.overdrive.com/
The Digital Catalog, is an online catalog containing eBooks, eAudiobooks, and digital magazines. You can use your library card and checkout content on a PC; you can also use the companion app, Libby, to access titles on your mobile devices; so you can enjoy eBooks and eAudiobooks on the go!
All card holders of all Southern Tier Library System member libraries can check out items from the Digital Catalog.
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Hoopla Catalog: https://www.hoopladigital.com/
The Hoopla Catalog features on demand checkouts of eBooks, eAudiobooks, comic books, albums, movies and TV shows. Patron check out limit is 10 items per month.
Hoopla is a Southeast Steuben County Library service available to all Southeast Steuben County Library card holders.
The Hoopla companion app, also called Hoopla is available for mobile devices, smart TVs & media streaming players.
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StarCat: The catalog of physical/traditional library materials: https://starcat.stls.org
Card holders of all Southern Tier Library System member libraries can access StarCat to search for and request materials available at libraries through out the Southern Tier Library System.
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Have questions about how to access Internet based content (i.e. eBooks, eAudios)? Feel free to drop by the Reference Desk or call the library and we will assist you! The library’s telephone number is: 607-936-3713.
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Tech & Book Talk is a Southeast Steuben County Library blog.
Tech & Book Talk at SSCL 